by Kelly Rimmer
“Are you watching me sleep?” he says, opening his eye just a crack. His voice is rough with sleep, but there’s an amused lilt to it.
“Hey,” I whisper.
“Hey,” he whispers back, and then he smiles. “Sleep well?”
“So well.”
“Me, too,” he says, then he reaches down to brush his lips against mine and excuses himself to use the bathroom. I stretch out across the bed, a contented smile lingering on my lips as I wait for him.
“What time is it?” he calls from the bathroom. I glance down at my watch.
“It’s 8:00 a.m.” I run my hands over my breasts, feeling my body coming to life at the thought of continuing last night’s makeup-sex marathon. “Come back to bed.”
“Shit,” he says, “The car will be here soon.”
At first, I assume he’s cursing because the car is coming and he’s forgotten to cancel it. I hear him cleaning his teeth, then there’s the clink of bottles colliding, and then a zip sounds, and Paul saunters back into the bedroom with his toiletry case under his arm.
“What are you doing?” I assumed we’d talk this morning—to make a plan for the future, to figure out how to make a way forward together again, because there’s still so much left unsaid. I’m numb as I sit up in bed.
Paul diverts from his path to brush a kiss against my lips, but then continues his way to the closet. “Packing,” he says easily.
“Paul...” I whisper.
He glances at me, but his path doesn’t falter.
When he pulls the closet open and withdraws his bag, I clear my throat. “I just... It’s just... You’re really going back today? Now?”
“I have to,” he says. “I’m sure Audrey and Jess handled the retreat, but they’ll be waiting on me for decisions. There’ll be things that only I can do that will need to be done today.” He looks back at me again and frowns. “You get that, right?”
“Oh, I get it,” I say. I can’t help the bitterness that seeps into my tone. Even after everything we’ve been through, it seems that the business is still more important than we are to Paul. And the worst thing is, he did tell me on Saturday morning that he still loved his job. As much work as Paul has done on himself and as much as he missed me and missed us, his priorities haven’t actually changed.
“Why don’t you come back early with me?” he says, still cheerful. “We could—”
“No, Paul. I won’t be changing my plans to fit in with your schedule,” I snap. The warm glow I reveled in all morning as I watched him sleep has vanished. I’m overwhelmed by a rush of dark emotions, and I can’t decide if I should climb beneath the duvet and pull it over my head, or if I need to run downstairs and lock myself in the guest room before I burst into tears.
In the recesses of my mind, there’s a warning bell sounding: maybe I’m overreacting here. But Paul’s decision to leave this morning collides with the sorest of my sore spots, and I can’t stop and temper my own behavior because the hurt is instantly fresh and raw again.
I can’t believe he’s walking away from me right now. I let myself believe that things had really changed.
“Hey, listen to me,” Paul says, stepping away from his bag to approach me at the bed. He crouches in front of me and tries to meet my gaze. “Just because I have to go back today doesn’t mean that this isn’t important to me. It is. But there are people counting on me in the city. I can’t let them down.”
“No, you’re doing the right thing,” I whisper.
He nods, satisfied by this, and he stands, but then hesitates in front of me—apparently reading something in my expression that gives him pause. Meanwhile, my grief is rising all over again. I’m vaguely aware that this time it’s going to be even worse, because I had this glorious and awful glimpse of how things might have been.
Paul’s still staring at me, increasingly confused, and so I throw the duvet back so I can climb out of bed. “This was a bad idea.”
Paul blinks at me. “Isabel, what the fuck are you talking about? Two minutes ago you were so happy—”
“We’ve been kidding ourselves, caught up in isolation out here. But there’s a real world back there in the city, and nothing has really changed.” I interrupt him harshly.
“Everything has changed,” Paul says flatly, and all I can think is, My God, I hope he doesn’t fight for me this time. It was hard enough to walk away from him last time, but this time? After the way I stupidly let hope blossom inside me last night? This time, walking away might just kill me, especially if I have to convince Paul not to follow me.
“You’re still you. I’m still me. We are fundamentally incompatible, Paul.”
“Then what the hell were the last twelve hours about?” he says stiffly.
I feel a twist of guilt in my gut, but it’s soothed when I remind myself that he is making the decisions that break us. Not me.
“I was wrong,” I croak.
Paul’s neutral expression shifts, and suddenly he’s staring at me with suspicion. “Was this whole weekend just another way to kick me while I was down?”
“No!” This conversation is going nowhere, and I’m going to cry any second now. I reach into the en suite for a towel and wrap it around myself, then head toward the door.
He catches my elbow, and he ducks so that I can’t avoid his gaze. “Isabel. Talk to me. What is this?”
“Inevitable,” I whisper. I close my eyes and swallow hard. “This was inevitable. I’m sorry, Paul.”
There’s a long, painful moment of silence. When I open my eyes, Paul is staring at me, tightness in the set of his mouth.
“You’re serious.”
“I am,” I say quietly, then I raise my chin and for the second time in a year, I force myself to turn my back and walk away from him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Paul
I LET HER storm off downstairs. We’ll talk more—we’ll have to, but the clock is ticking now. My driver will be here any minute, and my whole team will be waiting for me back in the city.
It was one thing to take off for the weekend, knowing that Jess and Audrey would hold up the fort. It would be another to fail to not show up today, when the results from the retreat will be in, and decisions will need to be made about the release. My team will be counting on me, and maybe even more important, so will Jess and Marcus—two of my best friends, people who have built their entire careers around mine.
I simply have to go back.
When I bring my things downstairs, I find Isabel out on the deck, sitting on the sun chair, facing the ocean. I pull the sliding door open and step out to approach her.
“We need to talk—”
“Don’t do this, Paul,” she interrupts me, her tone curt. “Please, just go.”
“I can’t just go.” She flicks me a glance, but then goes back to staring at the ocean. “I love you. And you love me.”
“Maybe so. Maybe love isn’t enough, Paul. One good weekend together doesn’t undo the years of pain that came before it.”
“We’ve both changed,” I remind her.
She pauses, and she runs a hand through her hair, studiously avoiding my gaze now. “Paul, we’ve been in a bubble this weekend and it’s been easy to kid ourselves. But there really are very good reasons why we are getting divorced. You need to go, and we need to say goodbye.” She raises her gaze to mine, and this time, she holds my gaze without hesitation.
I stare at her, waiting for her to crumble. But even when I know that stare has stretched to the point that it’s uncomfortable, all I can see in Isabel’s face is stubborn determination and resolve.
She means it. She’s actually doing this again.
“Just tell me once and for all, so that when I look back at this moment, I don’t second-guess myself like I did last time,” I say flatly. “Was there anything I could have done to make y
ou happy? To make you try again?”
“No,” Isabel says. “I know you’ve done a lot of thinking...a lot of reflection and a lot of work on yourself. I’ll always care about you and I’m proud of you. I really am. That’s kind of why this is so confusing...because we feel so different on the surface. But deep down? People can’t change, Paul. Not really. There is nothing you would have done today to make me try again.”
I nod curtly, and then I close the door and stalk out to the car.
“Morning, Mr. Winton,” the driver says.
I nod at him, climb into the back seat and lean my head against the headrest, then close my eyes.
It occurs to me that I haven’t looked at my email in three days, at the worst possible time. If I were a smarter man, I’d check my messages so that I was prepared for whatever shitstorm waits for me at the office. But I can’t even motivate myself to pretend to care about work right now. As I feel the shock start to wear off, all I can think about is how wrong it feels to walk away from her and how every single cell in my body seems to be clamoring for me to have the driver turn the car around so I can go back.
I’m pissed off—I’m always mildly pissed off these days, at least I was until this weekend, but this is worse. This anger feels a lot less like the rage that’s kept me going this past nine months, and a lot more like grief and disappointment. Maybe that’s why I’m more than halfway back to the city before I even realize that I don’t have my laptop—it’s still charging on the table in the house where I left it Friday morning.
There is nothing you would have done today to make me try again.
I replay those moments on the deck over and over again in my mind as the car winds its way back to Manhattan, and gradually, something about the moment slowly begins to feel wrong. Off. Was it something about the way she held herself or the tone she used?
I don’t know, but as I reflect on that moment, I become increasingly sure that I’m missing something. She was telling me something deeper than the words she used. I try to dissect it over the last hour of the drive, as the city traffic becomes thicker and thicker. By the time I reach the building in the financial district that houses Brainway Technologies, the hidden message I can feel but can’t yet hear has consumed my entire mind.
I don’t even want to go upstairs to my office. I want to lock myself away in a sensory deprivation tank so that I can find enough peace and quiet to analyze that last argument with Isabel until I really understand it.
Maybe I’ll do that later. But first, I do have to face the music at the office.
I thank the driver and step out of the car, staring up at the building as if I’m a tourist, new to this jungle of skyscrapers. We share this building with dozens of other businesses, but even so, we’ve come a very long way from the one-bedroom apartment Jess, Marcus and I started out in.
I know every little thing about our software and our company. I know that Marcus’s team agonized over changing the font and the colors of this logo a few years ago, even though the change was simply to make the text slightly brighter and remove the serifs from the letters. I know that we now have 201 employees, which is a seventy-four percent increase over the last five years. I know—to the cent—what our turnover and our profit margin were last year. I know that as of last Friday morning, we had 204 outstanding bugs and defects on the coming version of the browser, and 119 feature requests. I know, by heart, the recent results from each of the performance indicators measured in our last round of QA testing. I know which lines of code I wrote myself in the early days. I still see them sometimes, and those strings of letters and numbers feel like old friends. I know our application better than I know myself. Any single thing it’s capable of, I know how to achieve.
There are sometimes still challenges in my work, but there’s rarely any mystery in the day-to-day detail of it. Unlike my personal life, which always has and probably always will be full of both. I know a lot of things about Isabel, too, but knowing things about her doesn’t mean I understand her. My intellect has meant success beyond my wildest dreams at work, but I’m out of my depth when it comes to my wife and I always have been.
There is nothing you would have done today to make me try again.
I step into the elevator with a bunch of strangers and at long last, I reach into my pocket for the phone I’ve not looked at since I called Dad last night. There’s a bunch of emails from my employees this morning, and a single text from Isabel, sent just after I left the vacation home three hours ago.
Goodbye, Paul. For what it’s worth, I really am sorry.
I’m numb as I walk to my office, nodding silently at staff but shaking my head immediately whenever anyone looks as though they might approach me. Vanessa stands when she sees me, her mouth open as if she’s going to launch a flood of problems or requests at me, but takes one look at my face, closes her mouth and sits back down.
I close my office door and call for a spare laptop from the systems team. I wait in silence for the laptop, then when it arrives, instead of logging in, I set my phone right on top of it and stare at the blank screen. After a deep breath, I wake the screen to show Isabel’s message again.
Goodbye, Paul. For what it’s worth, I really am sorry.
Her words play through my mind on a loop, and I keep replaying that moment at the deck over and over because I know she was trying to tell me something and I just can’t grasp it.
There is nothing you would have done today to make me try again.
There is nothing you would have done to make me try again.
There is nothing you would have done to make me try again.
There is nothing you would have done.
My door flies open and Audrey bursts in without preamble. My senior developer is a mess. Her purple hair is in haphazard pigtails, she’s got mascara all over her cheeks, and I don’t usually pay too much attention to these things, but even so—she was wearing a Garfield shirt when I left Thursday, which she’s still wearing, except now it’s splattered with food stains.
“I can’t believe you left me alone with that mess.” She scowls.
I hide a smile and motion toward the chair opposite my desk. “How did you do?”
“How did I do? How did I do? Are you kidding me right now, Paul Winton? Did you seriously not even look at the project management system all weekend? I figured you were bluffing!” The scowl morphs, and now she’s staring at me in puzzlement. “You’ve changed, Paul.”
I think back to the last retreat. Thirty-one fewer bugs. Forty-one fewer feature requests. And the look and feel of the browser weren’t changing at all—this time it is; we’re modernizing the interface completely. Last year’s was a much smaller release and we had so much less riding on it.
And yet I lived and breathed that retreat. I planned it obsessively. This time I didn’t even make it into the office.
I do still care this time... I’m just not fixated on the details in the same way, and maybe that’s not a bad thing. I’ve set a strategy in place and I’ve got a team here that really represents the best of the best. They don’t actually need me to babysit them, and even more than that, in babysitting them for all of these years, I’ve both held them back and neglected too many other areas of my life.
“I really have changed, haven’t I?” I wake the phone again and read Isabel’s message one more time.
Goodbye, Paul. For what it’s worth, I really am sorry.
Then I replay her final words to me.
There is nothing you would have done today to make me try again.
That’s when I finally hear my wife’s message, in all of its bewildering, complicated beauty. She didn’t say could. She said would.
If she’d said could, that would mean one thing. Because could relates to ability, specifically my ability to convince her to give our marriage another try. But would relates to will, and my willingness to convinc
e her.
Isabel Winton in all of her magnificent complication has underestimated me, and she’s underestimated my determination to build a life with her again.
I look around my office and take it all in. The awards we’ve won, the milestones we’ve celebrated, the profit and the achievement and growth and the pride of it all. It’s hollow without her. Maybe I knew that all along, because I certainly wanted to build something great for her. Maybe I missed that realization until this weekend because I was still trying to do too much at once, even after all of my hard-won self-development this year.
“...that bug on the macOS still isn’t resolved and Jess really wanted the feature request for—”
“Audrey?”
Audrey’s babble falters, and her face falls. “Paul, I really, really need you to switch back onto work-mode-Paul now,” she says weakly.
“I will,” I promise her, then I smile. Actually, given how my cheeks stretch, I’m pretty sure I beam at her, because I’m so fucking happy I’m sure it’s radiating out from my soul. “You just hop up out of that chair, leave the office and shut the door behind you and give me ten minutes to fix the rest of my life, and then I’ll help you sort it all out, okay?”
As soon as Audrey closes the door, I scoop my phone up and call my wife. It goes to voice mail, and I hesitate for only a second.
“Isabel Winton. You were so fucking wrong this morning, so, so fucking wrong. There is nothing—nothing—I wouldn’t do if it would convince you to try again. You just tell me what you need from me. Let’s talk. Let’s talk and talk and talk like this weekend over and over again, until we run out of breath and days and hours on this earth. Please, oh please, Bel, please let’s try again?”
I stop, take a deep breath and then feel blood rush to my face as I realize I’ve just left that message on her voice mail. Maybe Isabel was wrong about my father having more game than me. “Call me back as soon as you can, please, Bel.”
Then I stand and pace the office for a bit. But the wall to my office is glass, and that means I can’t miss the fact that Audrey is standing right outside my office, and she’s also pacing. I run my hands through my hair impatiently and throw the door open. “Okay, okay! Let’s get this shit sorted.”